What to look for in a legal drafting solution

Using an integrated drafting tool will help minimize the tedium of cutting and pasting from an existing document and checking and updating the status of your citations. These workflow distractions are time consuming and prone to error and it’s easy to get side-tracked, overwhelmed, and frustrated.

A recent study reports that drafting tools will cut proofreading time by as much as 60% and eliminate costly errors

Proofreading documents is a necessary evil. It can drag on for hours, and even when you take every precaution to prevent errors – using spell-check, printing the document to review it by hand or having a colleague give it the once-over – there’s still no guarantee that something hasn’t slipped through the cracks.

The less time a lawyer spends proofreading documents means more time that can be invested on more substantive, higher-value client work.

Are you being paid to proofread or practice law?

Of course, you and your clients demand perfection every time, but in order to achieve perfection, you’d need to proof things over and over again. But clients hate getting billed for hours of proofreading. They’d rather you spend your time giving them valuable legal advice – not spell-checking – and arguably so would you. Adding all those “empty” hours to the bill may turn off clients, which is never a good thing in today’s competitive environment. But writing off that time means less money in your pocket at the end of the day. So what’s a lawyer to do?

New study shows drafting software cuts review time in half and catches more errors than manual proofreading

Thomson Reuters conducted a nationwide study to determine whether legal drafting technology reduces the risk of errors and cuts down on review time, as compared to manual drafting. The phone survey included 56 attorneys from around the country from different sized firms whose practices included corporate, real estate, contracts, litigation, and others. All study participants were active users of legal drafting software for at least two months.

The study found that legal drafting solutions cut drafting time by more than half and reduced the risk of errors

93% say it catches items that they may have otherwise missed
91% say it saves them time when reviewing documents
89% say it helps them mitigate the risk of errors in their documents
89% say it enables them to effectively use their time on higher-value activities